Special Topics in Calamity Physics

by Marisha Pessl

  "You're going to be fine," he said. "My girl's a champion. Not afraid of anything. We'll get you home in an hour. You'll rest. Soon be right as rain."

  I was aware Dad, all Trumanish voice and Kennedyesque grin, was repeating these cheerleader phrases to inspire team spirit in himself, not me. I didn't mind. I'd been given some sedative via the IV and hence felt too balmy to grasp the full extent of his anxiety. To explain: I'd never actually told Dad about the camping trip. I'd told him I'd be spending the weekend at Jade's. I didn't mean to be deceitful, especially in lieu of his newfound McDonald's styled approach to parenting (Always Open and Ready to Serve), but Dad despised outdoor activities such as camping, skiing, mountain biking, parasailing, base jumping and, even more, the "dimwitted dulls" who did them. Dad had not even the remotest desire to take on the Forest, the Ocean, the Mountain or the Thin Air, as he detailed extensively in "Man's Hubris and the National World/' published in 1982 in the now-obsolete Sound Opinions Press.

  I present Paragraph 14, the section entitled "Zeus Complex": "The egocentric Man seeks to taste immortality by engaging in demanding physical challenges, wholeheartedly bringing himself to the brink of death in order to taste an egotistical sense of accomplishment, of victory. Such a feeling is false and short-lived, for Nature's power over Man is absolute. Man's honest place is not in extreme conditions, where, let's face it, he's frail as a flea, but in work. It is in building things and governing, the creation of rules and ordinances. It is in work Man will find life's meaning, not in the selfish, heroin-styled rush of hiking Everest without oxygen and nearly killing himself and the poor Sherpa carrying him."

  Due to Paragraph 14, I didn't tell Dad. He'd never have let me go, and though I hadn't especially wanted to go myself, I also didn't want the others to go and have a mind-blowing experience without me. (I had no idea how mind-blowing it would actually be.)

  "I'm proud of you," Dad said.

  "Dad," was all I could scuff. I did manage to touch his hand and it responded like one of those mimosa plants, but in the opposite way, opening.

  "You will be fine, little cloud. Fine. Fine as a fiddle."

  "Fit," I scratched.

  "Fit as a fiddle."

  "Promise?"

  "Of course I promise."

  An hour later, my voice had begun to tiptoe back. A new nurse, Stern Brow (illicitly kidnapped by White Lab Coat from another floor of the hospital, in order to placate Dad) took my blood pressure and pulse ("Doin' fine," she said before humphing off).

  Although I felt bug-snug under the sunshine lights, the hospital beeps, clicks and toots soothing as fish noises one hears in the ocean while snorkeling, gradually, I noticed my memory of the night before had begun to show signs of life. As I sipped my coffee listening to the aggravated mutters of a croaky gentleman recovering from an asthma attack on the other side of the curtain ("Reely now. Got to get home and feed my dog." "Just another half hour Mr. Elphinstone."), suddenly I was aware Hannah had snuck into my head: not as I'd seen her—God no—but sitting at her dining room table

  listening to one of us, her head tilted, smoking a cigarette, then ruthlessly stabbing it out on her bread plate. She did that on two occasions. I also thought about the heels of her feet, a tiny detail not many others noticed: sometimes they were black and so dry, they resembled pavement.

  "Sweet? What's the matter?" I told Dad I wanted to see the policeman. Reluctantly, he agreed and twenty minutes later I was telling Officer Coxley everything I could remember.

  According to Dad, Officer Gerard Coxley had been waiting patiently in the Emergency waiting room for over three hours, shooting the shit with the attendant nurse and other Low Priority patients, drinking Pepsi and "reading Cruising Rider with such an immersed expression I could tell it's his secret instruction manual," Dad reported with distaste. Yet Still Life patience appeared to be one of Gerard Coxley's predominating characteristics (see False Fruits, Drupes and Dry Fruits, Swollum, 1982).

  He sat with his long skinny legs crossed like a lady's on the low blue plastic chair Stern Brow had carried in for the occasion. He balanced a withered green notepad on his left thigh and wrote on it, left-handedly, in ALL CAPS, with the speed of an apple seed burgeoning into a ten-foot tree.

  Midforties, with messy auburn hair melting over his head and the drowsy squint of a late-August lifeguard, Officer Coxley was also a man of reductions, of distillations, of one-liners. I was propped up with pillows (Dad shadowing Coxley at the foot of the bed), trying my hardest to tell him everything, but when I completed a sentence—a complex sentence, full of invaluable details painstakingly mined from all that darkness, because confusingly, none of it seemed real anymore; every recollection now seemed Mr. DeMille-lighted in my head, all klieg lights and special effects and lurid stage makeup, pyrotechnics, atmospherics—after all of this, Officer Coxley would write down only one, maybe two words.

  ST. GALLWAY 6 KIDS HANA SCHEDER TEACHER DEAD? SUGARTOP VIOLET MARTINEZ.

  He could shrink any plot of Dickens into haiku.

  "Only a few more questions," he said, squinting at his e.e. cummings poem.

  "And when she came and found me in the woods," I said, "she was wearing a large satchel, which she hadn't had on before. Did you get that?"

  "Sure I got it." SATCHEL

  "And that person who followed us, I want to say it was a man, but I don't know. He was wearing large glasses. Nigel, one of the kids with us, he wears glasses, but it wasn't him. He's very slight and he wears tiny spectacles. This person was large and the glasses were large. Like Coke bottles."

  "Sure." BOTTLES "To reiterate," I said, "Hannah wanted to tell me something." Coxley nodded. "That was the reason she took me away from the campsite. But she never got to tell me what it was. That was when we heard this person near us and she went after him." By now my voice was nothing more than wind, at its most emphatic, a jet stream, but I wheezed on and on, in spite of Dad's concerned frown.

  "Okay, okay. I got it." CAMPSITE Officer Coxley looked at me, raising rambutan-eyebrows and smiling as if he'd never had an Eyewitness quite like me before. In all probability, he hadn't. I had a disturbing feeling Officer Coxley's experience with Eyewitnesses was geared not toward murder or even burglary, but motor vehicle accidents. The fifth of his series of questions (posed in such a bland voice, one could almost see the paper labeled EYEWITNESS QUESTIONNAIRE thumbtacked to the station bulletin board next to a sign-up sheet for the 52nd Annual Auto Theft Weekend Roundtable and the Police Intra-Personals Corner, where department singles posted their Seekings in twenty-eight words or less) had been the supremely disheartening: "Did you notice any problems at the scene of the mishap?" I think he was hoping I'd say, "Out-of-order traffic signal," or "Heavy foliage obscuring a stop sign."

  "Have any of them been found yet?" I asked. "We're working on it," said Coxley. "What about Hannah?" "Like I said. Everyone's doing their job." He ran a thick podlike finger down the green notepad. "Now can you tell me more about your relationship to-?" "She was a teacher at our school," I said. "St. Gallway. But she was more than that. She was a friend." I took a deep breath. "You're talking about—" "Hannah Schneider. And there's an T in her last name." "Oh, right."1 "Just to be clear, she's the person I think I saw . . ." "Okay," he said, nodding as he wrote, FRIEND

  At this point, Dad must have decided I'd had enough, because he stared at Coxley very intensely for a moment and then, as if deciding something, stood up from the end of the bed (see "Picasso enjoying high times at Le Lapin Agile, Paris," Respecting the Devil, Hearst, 1984, p. 148).

  "I think you must have everything then, Poirot," Dad said. "Very methodical. I'm impressed."

  "What's that?" asked Officer Coxley, frowning.

  "You've given me a new respect for law enforcement. How many years on the job now, Holmes? Ten, twelve?" "Oh. Uh, going on eighteen now." Dad nodded, smiling. "Impressive. I've always loved the lingo—DOA, DT, OC, white shirts, skels—isn't that right? You'll have to forgive me. I've wat
ched more than my share of Columbo. I can't help but regret never going into the profession. May I ask how you got into it?"

  "My father."

  "How wonderful."

  "His father too. Go back generations."

  "If you ask me, there aren't nearly enough young people going into the force. Bright kids all go for the high-flying jobs and does it make them happy? I doubt it. We need sound people, smart people. People who know their head from their elbows."

  "I say the same thing."

  "Really?"

  "Good friend of mine's son went to Bryson City. Worked as a banker. Hated it. Came back here, I hired him. Said he'd never been happier. But it takes a special kind of man. Not everyone— "

  "Certainly not" said Dad, shaking his head.

  "Cousin of mine. Couldn't do it. Didn't have the nerves."

  "I can imagine."

  "I can tell straight off if they're going to make it."

  "No kidding."

  "Sure. Hired one guy from Sluder County. Whole department thought he was great. But me. I could tell from the look in his eyes. It wasn't there. Two months later he ran off with the wife of a fine man in our Detective Division."

  "You never know," said Dad, sighing as he glanced at his watch. "As much as I'd love to keep talking—" "Oh-"

  "The doc out here, I think he's pretty good, he suggested Blue get home to rest and get her voice back. I guess we'll wait to hear about the others." Dad extended his hand. "I know we're in good hands."

  "Thank you," said Coxley, rising to his feet, shaking Dad's hand. "Thank you. I trust you'll contact us at home in the event of additional

  questions? You have our telephone number?" "Uh, yes, I do." "Terrific," said Dad. "Let us know any way we can be of service." "Sure. And best of luck to you." "Same to you, Marlowe." And then, before Officer Coxley knew quite what had happened to him,

  before I knew what had happened to him, Officer Coxley was gone.

  24

  One Hundred Years of Solitude

  I n severe circumstances, when you inadvertently witness a person dead, something inside of you gets permanently misplaced. Somewhere (within ilthe brain and nervous system, I'd imagine) there's a snag, a delay, a stumbling block, a slight technical problem.

  For those who've never had such bad luck, picture the world's fastest bird, the Peregrine Falcon, Falco peregrinus, splendidly diving toward its quarry (unwitting dove) at over 250 mph, when abruptly, seconds before its talons are to strike a lethal blow, it feels light-headed, loses its focus, goes into a tailspin, two bogies, three o'clock high, break, break, Zorro got your wing-man, barely managing to pull up, up, righting itself and floating, quite shaken, to the nearest tree on which it could once again get its bearings. The bird is fine—and yet, afterward, really for the rest of its life span of twelve to fifteen years, it is never able to nosedive with quite the same speed or intensity of any of the other falcons. It is always a little off-center somehow, always a little wrong.

  Biologically speaking, this irreparable change, however minute, has no right to occur. Consider the Carpenter Ant, who allows a fellow ant recently found dead on the job to remain where he is a total of fifteen to thirty seconds before his lifeless body is picked up, hauled out of the nest, and tossed into a pile of debris composed of bits of sand and dust (see All My Children: Fervent Confessions of an Ant Queen, Strong, 1989, p. 21). Mammals, too, take an equally humdrum view of both death and bereavement. A lone tigress will defend her cubs against a roving male, but after they are slaughtered she will "roll over and mate with him without hesitation" (see Pride, Stevens-Hart, 1992, p. 112). Primates do mourn—"there is no form of grief as profound as a chimpanzee's," declares Jim Harry in The Tool-Makers (1980)—but their anguish tends to be reserved only for immediate family members. Male chimpanzees are known to execute not only competitors but also the young and disabled both inside and outside their clan, occasionally even eating them, for no apparent reason (p. 108).

  Try as I might, I could summon none of the c'est la vie sangfroid of the Animal Kingdom. I began to experience, over the course of the next three months, full-blown insomnia. I'm not talking about the romantic kind, not the sweet sleeplessness one has when one is in love, anxiously awaiting the morn so one can rendezvous with a lover in an illicit gazebo. No, this was the torturous, clammy kind, when one's pillow slowly takes on the properties of a block of wood and one's sheets, the air of the Everglades.

  My first night home from the hospital, none of them, not Hannah, Jade or the others, had been found. With the rain blathering endlessly against the windows, I stared at my bedroom ceiling and was aware of a new sensation in my chest, the feeling that it was caving in like an old piece of sidewalk. My head was seized by dead-end thoughts, the most rampant of which was the Moving Picture Producer's Yen: the tremendous and supremely unproductive desire to scrap the last forty-eight hours of Life, rid myself of the original director (who obviously didn't know what He was doing) and reshoot the entire affair, including substantial script rewrites and recasting the leads. I sort of couldn't stand myself, how safe and snug I was in my wool socks and navy flannel pajamas purchased from the Adolescent Department at Stickley's. I even resented the mug of Orange Blossom tea Dad had placed on the southwest corner of my bedside table. (It read, "A Stitch in Time Saves Nine" and sat there like an unpopped blister.) I felt as if my fortunate rescue by the Richardses was akin to a first cousin with no teeth and a tendency of spitting when he talked—downright embarrassing. I had no desire to be the Otto Frank, the Anastasia, the Curly, the Trevor Rees-Jones. I wanted to be with the rest of them, suffering what they were suffering.

  Given my state of turmoil, it will come as no surprise that in the ten days following the camping trip, St. Gallway's Spring Break, I found myself embarking on a sour, irksome and altogether unsatisfying love affair.

  She was an insipid, fickle mistress, that two-headed she-male, otherwise known as the local news, WQOX News 13. I started seeing her three times a day (First News at 5, News 13 at $:^o, Late Night News at 11:00), but within twenty-four hours, with her straight talk, shoulder pads, ad-libs and commercial breaks (not to mention that backdrop of faux sun permanently setting behind her) she managed to strong-arm her way into my unhinged head. I couldn't eat, couldn't try to sleep without supplementing my day with her half-hour programming at 6:30 A.M., 9:00 A.M., noon and 12:30 P.M.

  Like all romances, ours began with great expectation.

  "We have your local news next," said Cherry Jeffries. She was dressed in Pepto-dismal pink, had hazel eyes, a tight smile reminiscent of a tiny rubber band stretched across her face. Thick, chin-length blond hair capped her, as if she were a ballpoint pen. "It's called the Sunrise Nursery School, but the

  D.S.S. wants the sun to go down on the center after multiple allegations of abuse."

  "Restaurant owners protest a new tax increase by city hall," chirped Norvel Owen. Norvel's sole distinguishing characteristic was his male pattern baldness, which mimicked the stitching of a baseball. Also of note was his necktie, which appeared to be patterned with mussels, clams and other invertebrates. "We'll talk about what it means for you and your Saturday night on the town. These stories coming up."

  A green square popped up and hovered at Cherry's shoulder like a good idea: SEARCH.

  "But first, our top story," said Cherry. "Tonight an intensive search continues for five local high school students and their teacher reported missing in the Smoky Mountain National Park. Park authorities were alerted early this morning after a Yancey County resident found a sixth student near Route

  441. The student was admitted to a local hospital for exposure and was released in stable condition earlier this evening. The Sluder County Sheriff says the group entered the park Friday afternoon, expecting to camp for the weekend, but later became lost. Rain, wind and heavy cloud cover have decreased visibility for the rescue squads. But with temperatures staying well above freezing, Park rangers and Sluder County Police
stay optimistic the others will be rescued without injury. Our hearts go out to all the families and everyone involved in the search."

  Cherry glanced down at the blank piece of paper on the plastic blue desk. She looked up again.

  "People are horsing around at the Western North Carolina Farm Center with the arrival of a brand new pony."

  "But this is no ordinary horse, of course, of course," piped Norvel. "Mackenzie is a Falabella Miniature Horse standing a little over two feet tall. Curators say the pony originates from Argentina and is one of the rarest breeds in the world. You can go see Little Mac for yourself at the petting corral."

  "It happens every year' said Cherry, "and its success depends on you."

  "Later," said Norvel, "details on Operation Blood Drive."

  By the following morning, Sunday, my fly-by-night infatuation had congealed into obsession. And it wasn't just the news I was anticipating, yet still had not heard—that rescue teams had at last found them, that Hannah was alive and safe, that Fear (renowned for its hallucinogenic qualities) had conjured everything I'd heard and seen. There was something undeniably gripping about Cherry and Norvel (Chernobyl, I called them) a quality that forced me to withstand six hours of talk shows (one theme of significance, "From Frog to Prince: Extreme Male Makeovers") and cleaning commercials featuring housewives with too many stains, kids and not enough time, to catch their second segment together, Your Stockton Power Lunch at 12:30. A wide and triumphant smile elbowed through Cherry's face when she announced she was the sole anchor this afternoon.